Yes, that was the wording then, it was the qualification to vote (male, citizen, over 21). Since the adoption of the 19th Amendment (which happened after, and supercedes this text) that standard has included women and today you just need to be a citizen and over 18. The proportionality of loss of EC votes and congressional seating (these are apportioned on the same basis, after all) was about states like South Carolina and Mississippi, whose population of enslaved people exceeded that of white citizens- if these states didn’t respect the new citizenship and voting rights of most of their citizens, they’d lose more than half of their federal representation, and that in turn would cost them and their confederates influence in the resulting federal government.

My prior comment, made in the context of a Kansas court declaring that voting is not a right according to the Kansas constitution, was intended to point out that if nobody has that right in Kansas, that may be well and fine in Kansas politics, but if Kansas conducts itself in that way it will cost them influence federally, and that sets the stage for another round of Voting Rights Acts that can be used to guarantee voting rights federally even if states don’t want to do it themselves.

The US Constitution, on the other hand, does not oblige the federal government to recognize the electoral votes or congressional delegates of a state that does not enfranchise its citizens and submit to their will in the form of their votes.

The Guarantee Clause (article 4, section 4) of the constitution requires that state governments take the form of a republic, versus that of a theocracy or monarchy or dictatorship. (All republics involve some degree of democracy). Section 2 of the 14th Amendment says that if states deny citizens the right to vote, those states shall lose their representation at the federal level- that is, if you’re not a democracy that submits to the will of its voters, you can do that but in the process your electoral college votes and ability to send congressmen to DC goes away- and your state will lose its ability to influence federal law and to elect federal officials.

Of course, the current SCOTUS is likely to find some way to assert that anything giving the GOP political advantage must be what the framers would have wanted no matter how many ways they told us unambiguously they fucking wanted government derived from the consent of the governed.

For your consideration, here is the text of section 2 of the 14th amendment:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

A literal reading of this text, apart from the anachronism by which voters must be male and 21 (which should be overridden by the 19th amendment, which enfranchises women’s vote, and the fact that voting age today is 18) says that if your state doesn’t let its citizens vote and abide by the result, its electoral college votes won’t count either, and neither will its congressional delegation be seated.

Isn’t the requirement only that the government be “republican”? A republican government doesn’t necessarily have to be representative. It only needs to not be a monarchy.

That’s the requirement of the Guarantee Clause (article 4, section 4) of the constitution- in its time, it was about barring non-democracy states from statehood, it was a guarantee of protection of any state from foreign invasion, and protection of any state from internal coup or rebellion.

But, if you look at section 2 of the 14th Amendment, it’s a banger: if the right to vote is denied to citizens qualified to vote, the state doing it will lose its federal representation (as in, it will not just lose its electoral college votes in federal elections, its congressmen will not be seated). The purpose for this section of this amendment was to prevent confederate states from denying the formerly-enslaved the right to vote, and it should certainly apply today if Red-State legislators try to use their power to strip their citizens of their ability to meaningfully vote

At what point does this sort of thing stop being politics and start being organized crime? So now I halfway-hope the vigilantes that try to do this will end up facing criminal charges for it

But, I also halfway-expect cops and prosecutors to look the other way if the victims of this kind of crime ends up being the kind of people they’d be disproportionately policing and convicting anyhow

OK, so now I halfway-hope the vigilantes that try to do this will end up facing criminal charges for it

But, I also halfway-expect cops and prosecutors to look the other way if the victims of this kind of crime ends up being the kind of people they’d be disproportionately policing and convicting anyhow

While on the one hand I can agree there’s a place and time to be present and participate appropriately, on the other hand it’s so goddamned tiring to see politics that in situations of nuance zoom in on ‘control them’ as a thing everyone can rally to as if the solution of phone control was really going to be simple and accomplish its objectives.

I mean, criminalizing drugs seemed on its face to be a simple-enough thing to do, and a good idea- who could object to that, right? Who favors addiction, right? What could go wrong? Fundamentally, the ask for enough power to ban anything isn’t a trivial ask, and it shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.

…thus showing that the “Law and Order” party was never about law, they just want a particular kind of order- that is, a hierarchy wherein people below them on the status-ladder know not to try to hold them accountable to anything, including the law or even plain decency.

To them, the law is the cudgel to keep the poors and plebes in their place- low in the order- never to be applied to them.

It’s not so bad once you’ve got your teeth into the problem

assuming you can code, that is

Grew up in a rural red state. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to really understand their politics, and as best I can summarize, here it is:

• They are angry about how life has gotten worse for them, economically and culturally.

• They have very good reason to be angry about that, because it has.

• They are misinformed about what changed since the 50s and 60s, and too many of them seem to think more racism and sexism will restore their prosperity and dignity

• They have decided the only thing to do about it any more is to burn everything down until they get the respect they feel entitled to

• They are sincerely sad and angry it hasn’t worked yet

The shorter story here, of course, is that the establishment GOP of the late 70s underestimated the willingness of its fascist wing to not die and completely didn’t do the necessary things to prevent the party from being almost completely taken over by fascists

23k is the max annual contribution

If you’re over 50, you can put $30,500 in your 401k, the extra $7500 per year is called a ‘catch-up contribution’

It’s true that the cultural left didn’t suppress wages or unions or offshore manufacturing jobs or cause all those farms to fail or any of those other things, but one thing that made the left vulnerable to such charges is that when the Democrats embraced neoliberalism, they implicitly became the party of credentialed professionals. When the Democrats abandoned the working class to compete for the donor dollars the right had long enjoyed, it meant that the working class went from having 1 party for it to having 2 parties actively working against its interests.

It’s so wild to me that the GOP has been considered the working man’s party by anyone since the 1890s

Consider the possibility that the game here does not depend on Trump winning in the Electoral college- all that needs to happen is Biden not winning 271 or more EC votes for the congress to decide the presidency via the Contingent Election process outlined in article2, sec1 clause3 of the constitution, later modified in the 12th amendment.

In that scenario, each state delegation has 1 vote- and the GOP has enough state-level gerrymanders to control enough state delegations that if it comes to pass that the 12th Amendment process decides the presidency, they are very likely going to be able to install whoever they want.

If the smart money in the GOP has decided Trump won’t win but it still wants him in the oval, anything that prevents Biden from getting 270+ gets them better odds than any other pathway

When you have financial engineers overriding the decisions of mechanical engineers, you get crashy airplanes and eventually, caught up murdering people that might talk to investigators in order to defend those juicy profits

…sort of like how when administrators and insurance folk and lawyers and judges override the decisions of doctors and nurses, you end up with highly profitable hospitals and people dying for it

…all a bit like when the bean counters run your software company, layoffs designed to boost stock price by showing investors ‘fiscal discipline’ leaves your engineering teams shorthanded and forces them to de-prioritize bug fixes and dealing with technical debt and rigorous testing and you end up shipping lots of bugs when you release your product

This is where windfall taxes come back into basic utility. Also it becomes the basis for antitrust action on price collusion if all the sellers coordinate

…you really do need to be specific. Otherwise, it sounds like you’re claiming that “the production processes” (of what, everything? all products in the entire economy?) require PFOAs- and that’s plain bullshit.

Yes, there are some products for which there aren’t equivalent inputs, and you don’t need to be vague and generalize over all of productive everything in the economy in order to make that point- but given the opportunity to be specific, you specified “production of base chemicals that are used in various other follow-up products” and that’s not a straight or specific answer to a direct question.

there is no other material known to withstand the temperatures and pressures needed in the production processes?

Production of what, exactly?

I usually use the name of the drug when there are multiple brands with trade names for it, or when there are trade-name drugs that use multiple formulations with different ingredients.

For example, famotodine is the active agent in Pepcid and Zantac. Omeprazole is sold as Prilosec and Losec. Acetaminophen is in Tylenol, Tempra, and Panadol

When I want Pseudoephedrine and not phenylephrine, they’re both branded under the trade name ‘Sudafed’ but only one of them really works for sinus pressure.

When I want Dextromethorphan or Guaifenesin (active ingredients in Robitussin) there are lots of other brands (Nyquil, dayquil, etc) that deliver them and knowing which drug is which and what part they do means I can pick which one to use if I don’t want the other one’s shitty side effects.

Welp. It’s time for Tesla workers to unionize, and hard

Is there a possible way that both the NYT and OpenAI could lose?